Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives from 2001
The question is now upon us. Who killed more innocent, defenseless people? The terrorists in the United States on September 11 with their crashing airplanes? Or the American government in Afghanistan the past ten weeks with their AGM-86D cruise missiles, th...
The deep craters and pieces of shrapnel indicate that America’s weapon of choice in Kabul was the Mark 82 500lb bomb, which is designed to be guided to its target by the pilot, a nearby observation plane or a spotter on the ground. But there was...
When we look back at the great state crimes of the last century — German militarism, Soviet authoritarianism, American imperialism — we comfort ourselves by descrying in each case dissident movements that bore the stifled conscience of humanity. But in...
It is no longer surprising, nor is it ironic.
In the US, many observers, rights activists and civil liberties
groups are failing even to wonder at the glaring paradoxes of
America ‘s readiness to shatter away its once established ...
These photographs of Afghan refugees were taken in the Katchagiri Refugee Camp, Peshawar, Pakistan in 1983. Eighteen years later, the two million Afghans left in dusty, sprawling camps in Pakistan after the Soviet war, are joined by new refugees fleeing the...
In time for the Christmas holidays, President Bush has presented a lump of coal to the American people: the first withdrawal from a major arms control agreement since World War II. President Bush is doing his best impression of Scrooge, telling the rest of...
Before he won the Nobel Prize in 1988, Naguib Mahfouz was known outside the Arab world to students of Arab or Middle Eastern studies largely as the author of picturesque stories about lower-middle-class Cairo life. In 1980 I tried to interest a New York publisher,...
U.S. envoy to the Middle East, retired marine general Anthony Zinni’s announcement of his decision to end his cease-fire mission following his meeting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon adds yet another blunder to the numerous failed attempts throughout his...
U.S. envoy to the Middle East, retired marine general Anthony Zinni’s announcement of his decision to end his cease-fire mission following his meeting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon adds yet another blunder to the numerous failed attempts throughout his...
Osama Bin Laden is finally captured alive and is brought to America for justice. He is found guilty by a military tribunal and the sentence is death, by hanging. There are cameras in the “courtroom” and CNN’s audience ratings triple that of the O...
After days of anticipation, television viewers the world over witnessed the grand premiere of the mystery tape in which, according to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, “bin Laden confirms his guilt” and consequently “totally vindicates the ac...
Professor Norman Finkelstein is one of a dying breed of American mavericks that relentlessly defies any attempt at easy categorization. He is the son of Holocaust survivors but an unremitting critic of Holocaust reparation claims; a Jew but is a life-long anti Zio...
In a blatant attempt to stifle growing criticism of recent government policy, Attorney General Ashcroft delivered testimony last week equating legitimate political dissent with something unpatriotic and un-American. We urge the Attorney General to learn from the h...
Human beings can get used to anything: pain or pleasure. And in this day and age of globalized media culture fed by saturation coverage and repetitive drudgery our attention span has become even shorter. It is not just interest that dwindles but even our understan...
Throughout the 20th century, the United States government has waged a war against a freedom of choice, disguised as protection of the collective good. Through this seemingly altruistic goal, the US government successfully created powers beyond that which the Unite...
What’s the world like? A flock of sheep. One falls into the ditch, the rest jump in. Kabir (Sakhi: 240, The Bijak of Kabir, trans. Linda Hess and Shukdev Singh) On TV screens across the globe, for more than two months now, the sheep have been...
When an unshaven, unkempt, hung-over Christopher Hitchens stumbled in front of the TV cameras to issue his Orwellian, convoluted excuse for betraying the confidence of his “friend” and “Jewish cousin.” Sidney Blumenthal, to the congressiona...
When I crossed the border into United States in 1988, after living in Canada for two years, I had the curious feeling that my wife, my son and I, still brown-skinned and dark-haired, had somehow become invisible. We walked the streets of Hamilton, a small u...
Citing a lack of specific criminal information, UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley announced in a written statement Thursday that UW Police will not assist the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the questioning of international students. “University offic...
Our nation just memorialized the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. It was the spark that lit the explosion called “the good war”. Conspicuously absent from most history books are some startling facts: American investments in Nazi Germany at the ...
I thought I had a strong stomach–toughened by the minefields and foul frontline hospitals of Angola, by the handiwork of the death squads in Haiti and by the wholesale butchery of Rwanda. But I nearly lost my breakfast last week at the Basrah Maternity and C...
They started by shaking hands. We said “Salaam aleikum” — peace be upon you — then the first pebbles flew past my face. A small boy tried to grab my bag. Then another. Then someone punched me in the back. Then young men broke my glasses, began smas...
For years, study after study has established a disturbing link between race and the death penalty. The concerns about racial discrimination in the administration of the death penalty persist in virtually every jurisdiction in which death remains a legal fo...
Yvonne Ridley, the British journalist captured by the Taliban, this week makes the extraordinary claim that Western intelligence agencies tried to get her killed to bolster public support for the air strikes on Afghanistan. In her new book, In The Hands of the Tali...
A recent criticism of Noam Chomsky by Jeffrey Isaac in the American Prospect offers up an use...